Losses….and found

In November 2007 we found out we were pregnant with our first injectables IUI. For those of you who missed it, things were rocky all the way along and in December, I had to fly cross-country to work a conference for work (end of the road). I started spotting the morning I left.

Where before I left I’d kept the pregnancy quiet from all but blog readers and very close friends and family, I found myself telling shop keepers in California that I was pregnant. I think I was trying to will it to be true. To find a way for that to be reality rather than what I feared was happening. When I got home I found out that the heartbeat had stopped the morning I left.

But while there, I bought hubby one of his X-mas gifts. It was outside my budget but I found myself returning again and again to the store to look at it. It was a black and silver bracelet meant to replace one that I’d given him before I left the UK. When it is open, the bracelet rather resembles a heart. When it is on and closed it bears more than a passing resemblance to a handcuff – which was appropriate as hubby was an auxilary officer at the time.

Because it is hard (rather than mailable and soft) hubby sometimes takes it off to type or whatever. Last night, we were piled on the couch watching tv and I realized that he wasn’t wearing it. I asked him about it and he said he wasn’t sure. In the back of my mind, I remembered handing it to him as he was leaving to go to work. We looked in the usual places in the house (and even the places where the cat would normally knock something) with no luck.

I was distraught. This morning, as I was looking again through the house after hubby went to work. I tried to figure out why it was bothering me so much. After all it was a thing. It could, to some extent be replaced. It wasn’t something we needed to live or even something with the intense significance of a wedding ring. But I was feeling as though it was.

And then I realized that it was, in my mind, attached to the pregnancy. I was pregnant for such a short time for the only time in my life. And that is one of the few tangible things I can point to and say “I bought that when I was pregnant”. It was a bit of a startling revelation actually. I didn’t know that I’d thought of it that way.

As I was about to give up on finding it. I looked at the bin where our firewood is kept and I remembered hubby reaching for something the other night and the bracelet falling into the bin. It was safe after all.

I’m not sure what the story means. Just that I was inordinately happy to find it.

I’m having a similar reaction to the fact that my period began today. Really, I shouldn’t care anymore. But I’m not sure how to shut that part of my mind off. I’m glad though to be clearing the drugs out of my system. Glad to feel some sort of progression and “normalcy” even though I’m not really sure what that word means any more.